But in Nigeria…
A female suicide bomber killed six people at a college campus in Nigeria’s Kano city on Wednesday, the fourth time Boko Haram Islamists were suspected of using a female attacker in as many days.
The latest violence came as the government announced the arrest of a 10-year-old girl with explosives strapped to her chest in a neighbouring area. [Read more…]
One piece of good news: The Pink Humanist reports that Uganda’s Constitutional Court has annulled the anti-gay legislation passed and signed into law last February.
It ruled that the bill was passed by MPs in December without the requisite quorum and was therefore illegal.
Homosexual acts were already illegal, but the new law allowed for life imprisonment for “aggravated homosexuality” and banned the “promotion of homosexuality”. [Read more…]
Originally a comment by Brony on Vulcans can’t argue.
@ brianpansky
Accepting that our primary motives are not rational (and not even conscious) is not , however, the same as saying – as Hume did – that reason should be the slave of emotions. Indeed, if that were the case, we should abandon any hope of progress in ethics and general well-being. Fortunately we do, in fact, use reason all the time to shape our emotions. What else is psychotherapy, if not a (mostly) rational attempt to modify our emotions? What are penalties for, if not to curb some desires?
Reason is in fact the slave of the emotions because reason is software carved into existence through the emotions. Emotions are tagging systems for transforming experience into memory, and recalling events stored and contextualized via those tags. You teach reason, not emotions. Psychotherapy is about modifying emotional contexts. Alterations of the tags and how they relate to stored memories. [Read more…]
Originally a comment by Nathaniel Frein on Public property.
@sonof: I think what Ophelia is saying in response to your #16 could be paraphrased as ‘bothering men that way is bad but doing it to women is WORSE so shut up and go away’, so apparently she is learning a lot from her new friend (Richard).
Oh do fuck off. Seriously.
You have the wide wide internet to make your point that “People in general should not have their emotions audited by others”, and instead you choose to come here and criticize one blogger for choosing to focus on a behavior that by far happens to women much more than men.
Lets have an anecdote off: I have never been told to smile. I have watched people tell my wife to smile constantly. Hell, I worked retail for a year and while I have what, on a woman, would be called a “bitchy resting face” I never got told that I needed to smile more, by customers or by management. In fact I often got complimented for my helpfulness and friendliness. Without smiling much.
Here’s another anecdote. My grandfather died three years ago, and my grandmother passed on about six months ago. My father has for the most part dealt with this loss, but the family home just sold and he commented gamely that he felt a bit uprooted. Now, I’ve never been in one place more than three or four years (largely due to choices made by my father), so I quipped “I wouldn’t know”. And immediately felt guilty. Cuz it was an asshole thing to do. I saw my father dealing with his personal loss, and I made the conversation about me.
You guys are that asshole right now. Stop it. Ophelia is not saying that your experiences are less than women’s. What she is saying is that this is not that conversation. If you want to have that conversation, go have it. I doubt anyone here would come over to say “but what about the women?” You’re pulling the same bullshit as people who say “I’m not a feminist, I’m an equalist”.
Fuck
Off.
Here’s an example of the kind of thing that the statement Richard Dawkins and I posted last week opposes.
John @JohnTheSecular
So tell me, @RichardDawkins, what is “modern art” the result of, then? Your fuckwittery?
I learned about another cognitive bias this morning – the curse of knowledge. Wikipedia explains.
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that leads better-informed parties to find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties. The effect was first described in print by the economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber, though they give original credit for suggesting the term to Robin Hogarth.
…
…researchers have linked the curse of knowledge bias with false-belief reasoning in both children and adults, as well as theory of mind development difficulties in children. The curse of knowledge bias reportedly decreases in degree for adults versus children, who experience exaggerated effects; however, it was also found that for adults: “knowledge becomes a more potent curse when it can be combined with a rationale (even if only an implicit one) for inflating one’s estimates of what others know”.
This has a lot of applications.
The last paragraph of chapter XXI of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.
Morality requires educated feeling. It’s never a finished product. We never get good enough at understanding other people’s equivalent centre of self. Reason and logic by themselves are hopeless at the task.
The WHO says Ebola is spreading faster than efforts to control it. That’s not good. We need it to be the other way around.
But it’s difficult. Poverty makes it more difficult. Poverty means lack of infrastructure, and that makes it more difficult.
Analysis: David Shukman, BBC science editor [Read more…]
Simon Davis talks to David Futrelle of Confused Cats Against Feminism and We Hunted the Mammoth (formerly Manboobz).
There’s a catharsis in saying “You know what? Your argument is based on ignorance. We’ve tried to explain this. We’re just gonna respond with a picture of a cat.” When you get into these discussions with these guys online, it becomes just like quicksand. Because you feel like you’ve fallen into this realm of “Wait a minute. The sky is blue, right?” It’s also just sort of nice to present something that I think the opponents of feminism just don’t know how to handle or don’t know how to react to. So when they see the cat pics, they can’t go into another regular one of their little rants because it’s a cat, and what’s being said is probably absurd. It sets them up for once.
